I've been rereading sections of Johanna Drucker's The Century of Artists' Books and wanted to articulate a few marginal notes I had made on her description of Mallarmé and Jabès conceptualising of the Book.
In "Action Restricted" Mallarmé collapsed his posing of the dilemma of how it is possible to act (in the broadest and most metaphysical sense of conceiving of an action and performing it) with an investigation of the act of writing.
This seems to me to bear some relation to the ideas I have been entertaining along a more psychological axis on the ways in which the qualities of the book medium are employed by artists in order to make it possible for them to act. The roots of my interest lie in the crucial moments of conception for the artist, who has to decide on how to act, how to create. There is always a crisis of decision when something is to be produced, and a crisis on deciding where the limits of it should or can be. The special space that is enclosed within a book can aid this process by way of providing a temporary structure. A space where ideas can be explored and limited, without having to try to make every point of conception join with that of the real world: it is a space where the suggestive power of metaphor is completely respected, and where the interpreting role of the reader to make the book complete- to make it approach its potential as anything resembling Mallarmé's conception of the Book as a spiritual instrument, capable of embracing the cosmos- is already implicit.
I am exploring this in terms of amplification of the artist's intention: the book can continue to hold the structures the artist has assembled in a space that has an implicit right to be considered critically as containing a system complete in itself. This is the framing aspect of books. More than that though, the book form itself has certain priveleges that allow it a certain authority: each book might be said to partake of the form of the book.
“A book [has] the capacity to use its form to establish “some nameless system of relationships” through which its strengths could be realised.”
However, I am framing this relationship in terms of the social construction of the book ( the book as an idea held in common by society, with causal force based on a shared assumption of the intentions the book-idea represents), and the presuppositional framework of the book ( the set of socially implicit assumptions that give rise to behaviours associated with books). Basically, I see the artist choosing to use books as a vehicle for their action because they want to tap in to some of these assumptions and behaviours, and because this priveleges their creation as a book. (There are myriad other considerations to do with seriality and structure, but for now I am concerned with the book's ability to contain and promote action). Another interesting and important aspect is the hybrid nature of artists' books, which baffles and loosens-up the social constructions and presuppositional frameworks they allude to, by being neither one thing nor another, by being a hybrid medium. Inasmuch as this changes the reading of the work, it changes the parameters of reading, and at a more extreme attenuation of the process, of the cognition of media and thus of consciousness.
"[The] Book was not the means to counteract the ephemerality of human action, nor was it to be used against the existential fear of identity, adequacy, or existence: it was instead to be recognised as a realm unto itself, capable of containing "certain extreme conclusions about art which can explode, diamontinely, in this forever time, in this integrity of the Book." This idea of the book is not rooted in a psychological function for the artist, nor a cultural function for the writer. Instead "The Book" functions as a metaphysical investigation which focuses on the possibility that form (in the most abstract and philosophical sense) might be realised through "The Book""
My investigations into the uses that books are put to by artists turn in quite a different direction. Respecting what Mallarmé says about the book as a "realm unto itself", my interpretation of the book's ability to proclaim totality is precisely as the "psychological function for the artist", and the "cultural function for the writer". Where Mallarmé proceeds from action to Being, to a spiritual function for the book, I think that my research is leading me more from action to presence in a less sweeping sense (than being) that would interrogate the book's potential as an amplifier of artistic intention. Rather than set out a spiritual agenda for The Book, I am instead setting out how artist’s books relate to ideas about The Book, and how they radicalise our conception of The Book and, by extension, other parts of culture.
Later… the interpreting reader… Edmond Jabès and the limits of narrative completion…Midrash and cycles of intention…cycles of intention and the hermeneutic cycle (Ricoeur) compared… the artist and the reader… returning to the temporary structure… the openness of the book
